Date: September 26th, 2004
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: ATI
<--SHOP FOR A ATI RADEON X300 BASED PCI EXPRESS VIDEOCARD HERE

PRODUCT PICTORIAL & WALKTHROUGH

Remember that this is a reference board and may or may not look like the X300 you are about to purchase. From what I have seen online, this card looks exactly like the cheaper priced versions made by some other manufacturers. Most seen have been the dual monitor connection variety.

Pictured above is the standard DVI monitor connection based X300 reference videocard. As you can see, this card is very small, compact and only comes with a passive based cooling solution.

The passive heatsink is perfectly suited for a lower performance targeted videocard. With lower core speed clocks, heat generation is greatly reduced and therefore a passive heatsink with decent case airflow with be complete sufficient. With the card benchmarking in a open testbed with no active airflow, the heatsink only was moderately warm to the touch.

This particular card was the lower end model with no dual monitor support. All that was included was a DVI connection and a S-Video output connection. Most people in the value market are only using one monitor anyway, so why would they want to pay more for a second connection if they won't ever use it.

BENCHMARKING TESTING SPECIFICATIONS

The PCI Express Videocard Testbed:

Intel P4 3.4Ghz LGA775 Extreme Edition 800FSB CPU Comparison Shop for this item
INTEL D925XCV LGA775 PENTIUM 4 MOTHERBOARD Comparison Shop for this item
1 GIG Mushkin DDR2 PC4200 533Mhz Comparison Shop for this item
Nvidia Reference 6800GT
Detonator 61.77 Drivers
Windows XP Professional SP1 Comparison Shop for this item
2X Maxtor Maxline III SATA 150 Drives in RAID 0 Comparison Shop for this item
Latest Intel Chipset and Peripheral Drivers

Videocards Benchmarked Against:


HIS Radeon X600XT

The programs are:

3DMark2001SE v330 (DX8 Synthetic Benchmark)
GLexcess v1.2V (OpenGL Synthetic Benchmark)
Quake3 Q3Crush Time Demo (OpenGL Real Gaming Benchmark)
Comanche 4 Demo Benchmark
GunMetal 2 DirectX 9 Benchmark
Aquamark Preset Benchmark
Doom 3 High Quality Benchmark New!

Benchmarking Explained:

This card is not intended for the ultra high-end enthusiast market and does not have the performance to run anything over 1280x1024 and anything over 4X AntiAliasing without taking a performance hit that would render gameplay useless and unenjoyable. I'm not saying it won't work at higher resolution, but really what is the point when your gameplay is poor.